Friday, December 18, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 16.)

An Auckland signage company recently erected a Christmas
billboard that appeared to mock sex-change celebrity Caitlyn (formerly Bruce)
Jenner.

Predictably, an outcry followed on social media. The
billboard was denounced as “transphobic”. Some of the signage company’s own
clients objected, presumably for fear of being condemned as guilty by
association (an understandable concern, given social media’s propensity for
lynch-mob vindictiveness).

The signage company duly took the billboard down,
apologising for its “bad judgment”. A donation of $1000 to a support group for
LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) youth accompanied the mea culpa.

This is an increasingly familiar and predictable
pattern.A company with a reputation for
pushing the boundaries draws attention to itself with a provocative
promotion.When Twitter and Facebook subsequently
erupt in protest, as they seem programmed to do, a backdown and apology usually
follow. We’re assured no offence was intended.

But by then the purpose of the promotion has been served:
the company has attracted the attention it sought. Its name now registers with
people who hadn’t previously heard of it (such as me, in this instance).

Even if the company takes down its billboard (or cancels its
ad campaign, or whatever), that in itself is likely to generate more media
coverage. Mission accomplished.

Everyone’s a winner. The company gets a higher public
profile (for which $1000 might seem a very modest price) and the objectors
enjoy the moral satisfaction of having chalked up another victory against
bigotry and oppression.

It’s like a ritual dance in which the steps are
choreographed well in advance and executed with practised precision.

As you might deduce, I’m sceptical about companies that come
up with edgy promotional ideas and then, when the complaints start pouring in,
sound surprised and even hurt, insisting that their intentions were
innocent.

Because I’m sceptical, I’m not going to gratify this
particular company by identifying it, or by repeating what the billboard said.
(I will, however, say that I find it hard to believe the company didn’t know it
was risking a backlash.)

But the fact that some companies court controversy with
provocative advertisements is only one of two interesting things going on here.

The other is that an ever-increasing proportion of the
population identifies itself as an oppressed minority and seems to go through
life looking for reasons to feel offended, as the reaction to the billboard demonstrated.

It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to wonder
whether the real victims of oppression are the diminishing majority who no
longer know what they can say without fear of upsetting someone and being
stigmatised as Nazis and bigots.

What makes it harder for this bewildered majority is that
the rules keep changing and new categories of victim seem to be created every
week.

Language becomes a minefield too – a means of imposing
ideological correctness. You use the wrong term at your peril.

While some of us are still familiarising ourselves with the
initials LGTB, further permutations keeping popping up, such as LGTBQ (for
queer) and LGBTI (for intersex). It’s as if a race is on to define ever more
rarefied categories of gender identity.

It seems kids are being dragged into this too. Among those
offended by the Caitlyn Jenner billboard was a woman who identified herself in
the media as the parent of a nine-year-old transgender boy. She was reported as
demanding a face-to-face apology from the signage company – not to her, but to
her child.

This is grandstanding, pure and simple. But worse than that,
it’s imposing adult concerns (or perhaps neuroses is a better word) on kids
whose greatest need is probably to be allowed just to be children. God knows,
their lives will get complicated enough as they get older.

I feel sorry for the boy in question, who was identifiable
because his mother was named in the media. He’s been dragged into a public
debate that he probably doesn’t understand and may have had no desire to be
part of.

Let’s accept that there may be genuine cases of transgender
children, but I doubt that they’re helped by parents politicising their
condition and using it as leverage in a public controversy. But this is what
it’s come to.

Defining yourself as a victim has become the thing to do.
And as more groups assert their victim status, the mainstream majority finds
its rights under increasing attack.

Public policy makers and private corporations have become
noticeably twitchy about upsetting vocal minorities. Their response is to
whittle away at freedom of speech.

There was a striking example of this in Britain recently
when Digital Cinema Media, which handles advertisements for several cinema
chains, banned a Church of England advertisement showing people (including the
Archbishop of Canterbury) reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The company was worried
that the ad, which was to be shown in the week before Christmas, would cause
offence to non-Christians.

We haven’t yet encountered such dangerous extremes of
timidity in New Zealand, but it’s bound to come.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

I wonder if this will be the summer when I get pinged for
exceeding the drink-drive limit.

It’s bound to happen sometime. Like most New Zealanders I
enjoy a drink, and we’re coming into the season of Christmas parties, barbecues
and leisurely outdoor lunches.

Trouble is, the tougher drink-drive laws introduced last
year make it far more difficult than before to judge whether you’re over the
limit.

The old limit – 80 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood –
allowed you to enjoy a social occasion without constantly fretting that you
might fail a breath test.

This didn’t mean you felt free to get plastered. The central
nervous system would start sending warning signals well before you reached the
point at which it became unsafe to drive. Responsible drivers – which means
most of us – knew when to stop.

The difference now is that you can be as sober as a Mormon
bishop and still be over the legal limit.

This is clear from the latest Transport Agency TV
advertisement in which a woman, thinking she’s doing the right thing, takes the
wheel after a party rather than let her husband drive home.

She appears unaffected by alcohol. She’s not giggly and her
speech isn’t slurred. But a breath test at a police checkpoint says she’s intoxicated.

As her young son watches from the back seat (oh, the shame
of it) she’s escorted to a booze bus and processed. The family gets a taxi home
because she’s too mortified to phone her parents, even though they live nearby.

The message is that even responsible, law-abiding people risk
social disgrace and humiliation by unwittingly exceeding the 50mg limit.

And make no mistake: disgrace and humiliation are crucial to
the ad’s impact. Its tone is as primly moralistic as any sermon from a pulpit.

But the scenario is realistic. I know people who found
themselves in exactly the same predicament as the woman in the ad after the new
law came into effect a year ago.

Immediately the law changed kicked in, police launched a blitz
that netted people who had probably never been a danger on the road in their
lives. For some it was a traumatic experience, and one that changed their view
of the police.

The other unmistakeable, if unstated, message conveyed by the TV ad is
that the only way to ensure you don’t fall foul of the law is to avoid alcohol
altogether. This is consistent with the alco-phobia promoted over the past
decade by police, academics and health authorities.

Yet alcohol has been a central part of our culture for
centuries. It’s how we celebrate, how we socialise, how we relax and how we
reward ourselves after a hard day or a stressful year.

And here’s another thing. The law change was sold to us on
the basis that it would reduce road deaths. Yet the road toll for the
Christmas-New Year period immediately after the new limit came into force was
more than double that of the previous year.

And that’s how it has continued. When I checked two days
ago, the toll so far this year was 293 compared with 271 a year ago.

This presents a slight credibility problem for all those who
supported the lower limit on the basis that it would result in safer roads.

Wellington alcohol counsellor Roger Brooking admitted in a recent interview with Tim Fookes on
NewstalkZB that the biggest impact of the law change appeared to have
been on responsible drivers, who were now being even more careful about their
alcohol intake. Serious binge drinkers, on the other hand, appear to be still
offending at the same rate.

In other words, the law makers missed their target – just as
they so often do (think Sue Bradford's anti-smacking law), and just as critics predicted they would.

This hasn’t stopped the police from continuing to enforce
the law with moralistic zeal. Over the summer period, every driver they pull
over, for whatever reason and at whatever time of day or night, is likely to be
breath tested.

This is oppressive. It will turn more people against the
police.

Now ask yourself: Would the woman in the TV commercial have
risked an accident had she not been stopped? There’s nothing in the ad to
indicate her driving is hazardous or irresponsible, and I suspect that’s true
of many drivers who have been fined as a result of the law change.

But this doesn’t matter to the finger-wagging, Mother Grundy
authorities, who won’t rest until ordinary New Zealanders are so cowed that
they become frightened to drink anything at all.

Saturday, December 5, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 2.)

I hesitated for a couple of days before casting my vote in
the flag referendum last week. I thought it might be too difficult.

I can be a shocking ditherer. Just deciding what to have for
breakfast can leave me paralysed with indecision. But as it turned out, when
the flag choices were starkly set out in front of me, I made up my mind almost
instantly.

I had the advantage of having seen all five flags flying
alongside one another only days before. They were flapping in a stiff
north-westerly, which is how flags are most often seen in our wind-buffeted
country. But I also saw how they looked during lulls in the gale, so was able to assess their merits both under stress and in repose.

I opted for the Kyle Lockwood design featuring the silver
fern and the Southern Cross, but with red in the top-left quadrant rather than
the black of the other Lockwood design included in the five alternatives.

Is it wise to reveal how I voted? Probably not, given the
vehemence of the flag debate. I should probably brace myself for hate mail and
death threats.

The intensity of people’s feelings about the referendum has been a surprise. All
sorts of strange emotions have been uncorked.

A debate about the flag is all very well, but this one has
become overheated to the point of inciting paranoia. On a talkback radio
station last week, I heard a caller say he had phoned the Electoral Commission because
he was worried that if he placed the figure 1 in the square underneath his
favoured design, someone might turn it into a four.

Another caller was convinced that the ballot paper had been
designed so as to subtly encourage voters to support John Key’s personal
favourite, which was the first option on the left.

It’s almost comically ironic that the country is tearing
itself apart over what’s supposed to be a symbol of unity. But since I’ve declared
my first preference, I might as well go further and list the order in which I
ranked the designs.

My No 2 choice was the black and white silver fern and No 3
was the second Lockwood design. I ranked the koru fourth and the so-called red
peak last. If there was a way of showing that I felt the red peak should have
been an extremely distant last, I would have so indicated.

Explaining why I voted the way I did is difficult because
these things are subjective, but I found the two Lockwood designs aesthetically
pleasing and unmistakeably emblematic of New Zealand, which is surely what a
flag is supposed to be. This is not to say there may not be better
alternatives.

The monochromatic fern I quite liked because it’s simple,
clean and emphatic. The koru design, too, is graphically strong and would be
instantly recognisable wherever it was flown.

People have attacked some of these designs as resembling
corporate logos, but I have yet to see anyone explain what mysterious quality
distinguishes a flag from a logo. Neither can I see how the red peak magically
avoids the disparaging logo comparison.

A flag, it seems to me, is simply a national logo as opposed
to a corporate one. Its essential qualities, surely, are that it should be
instantly recognisable and should engender feelings of identification, empathy and
pride.

The Lockwood design strikes me as being capable of doing all
these things, although it may take time (as it did for Canadians to embrace the maple leaf).

On the other hand, the red peak design fails from every
standpoint. But the very fact that it was included in the referendum, at the
last minute and largely as a result of a noisy social media campaign, says a
lot about how the flag debate has been derailed.

The proposal for a new flag is widely regarded as John Key’s
vanity project. It therefore was seen by his opponents as a means of damaging
him politically.

Key may poll highly but he’s nonetheless a polarising figure.
People who dislike him, and there are plenty of them, have used the flag debate
as an opportunity to get at him.

You’d have to say they largely succeeded. The late inclusion
of the red peak design was seen as a defeat for Key because he’s known to favour
a flag featuring the silver fern.

In other words the issue has been politicised in a way that
might not have happened had the change of flag been promoted by someone less
polarising.

If the binding referendum in March results in a decisive rejection
of the new flag, as seems likely, it could be as much a vote against Key as a
statement of support for the present ensign. We won’t know, because the waters
have become too muddied.

An opportunity for an emphatic new statement of nationhood may
have been lost because the issue has become so politicised.But at least no one will be able to say it
hasn’t been thoroughly debated.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

My wife and I just returned from a month in the United
States. These are some of my observations:

■ New York has a reputation as a pushy,
every-man-for-himself sort of place. In fact it’s anything but. We lost count
of the number of New Yorkers – young and old, male and female, black and white
– who noticed us peering at maps and offered assistance. If anything
distinguishes Americans from New Zealanders, it’s their readiness to engage
with strangers. New Zealanders might have the same impulse to help, but our
British reserve holds us back.

■ There can be few more magnificent sights than the
Manhattan skyline, viewed from Brooklyn Heights on a still, clear autumn
evening. But Brooklyn “Heights”? Come on. It’s just high enough to see over the
East River, no more.

■ I can understand, at a stretch, why American switches are
upside-down. The rationale is that it’s harder to turn things on by accident.
But can there be any plausible explanation as to why American plumbing is so
primitive and downright contrary?

■ Americans have an extraordinary tolerance of noise. They
talk loudly, they shout a lot (in a friendly way) and they have an ongoing love
affair with noisy V8s and those potato-potato-potato Harley-Davidsons. In the
Californian town where our son lives, each new day is announced by a symphony
of rumbling V8s as people head to work. Manhattan must be one of the noisiest
places on earth; those sirens you hear constantly in TV drama series are not
some scriptwriter’s invention – they really are part of the city’s soundtrack.

■ You can tell which part of the US you’re in by the
vehicles on the roads. In the south and west, the pickup truck is ubiquitous; the
Ford F150 has been the best-selling vehicle in the US for 32 years. But you’d
be hard-pressed to see any F150s in the cities of northeast, where bikes are
more popular these days than Detroit iron.

■ In Washington we stayed in the charming, historic
neighbourhood of Georgetown. Henry Kissinger lives here, as did Jackie Kennedy
after she was widowed. It’s said that Kissinger once went out to buy some
household items and couldn’t find his way home again. When a cop asked him how
he could not know where he lived, Kissinger explained that normally his driver
took him home. Even if not true, it’s a nice story.

■ Walking through the grounds of Harvard University, I heard
a man mention the word “quantum” in conversation as he passed. That’s one stereotype
obligingly confirmed.

■ Sometimes the serendipitous discoveries are the most
enjoyable. So it was with New York’s Old Town Bar, which we stumbled on in East
18th Street. It gives the impression of being
little changed since it opened in 1892, and I wondered whether some of our
fellow drinkers were original fixtures too.

■ American food is a problem. It’s not that it’s uniformly
awful – far from it. There’s just far too much of it. We all hear about
American obesity, but considering the size of the meals served, the marvel is
that they’re not even fatter. The other issue is variety, or lack of it.
Americans seem to exist on a diet of burgers, chicken, pizza and fries. Oh, and
copious quantities of cheese with everything. We have a far wider choice of
cuisine here.

■ Best meal? No contest. At Mario Batali’s Eataly in New
York (think Petone’s La Bella Italia, then multiply by10) I had a simple lunch
of ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta and served with a lemon sauce and
pistachios. Superb, and not expensive.

■ On the other hand, you can fall in love with the idea of
something and find the reality doesn’t quite match. That was the case with the
famous Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, through whose closed doors we had
gazed longingly on a previous visit to New York. Our long-anticipated lunch
there was just so-so.

■ Tipping can be a tricky issue when you’re not accustomed
to it. Do you tip regardless of how good the service is? If so, how much? I
generally tipped about 15 per cent, but I noticed that not all Americans
automatically tip, and I was reassured to hear a Boston radio host complaining
that he was never entirely sure whether to tip either.

■ Viewed from a passing train, some of the once-great cities
of the northeast – Philadelphia, Baltimore, Wilmington – look wretched and
moribund. Only the gleaming high-rises of the CBDs give any hint of prosperity.
Elsewhere, though, America gives the impression of being one giant construction
site. And you can’t repress that natural American optimism, even where
buildings are boarded up. It seems to be in their DNA.

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Back in the early 1980s, I was invited to run a feature-writing
course for journalism students at what was then Wellington Polytechnic (now
part of Massey University). The three full-time tutors didn’t think they had
the requisite experience to teach this form of journalism, and in hindsight I’m
not sure I did either. But for six weeks or so, one afternoon a week, I would
trudge up to the Polytech and try to pass on to the students what little I had
learned about writing feature-length stories.

At the end of the course, the tutors were keen to know which
students I thought stood out as potential feature writers. I named two. One, if
I recall correctly, was the daughter of the poet Lauris Edmond; the other was
Steve Braunias. At the mention of the latter name, the tutors almost literally
recoiled in astonishment. They’d written Braunias off as hopeless. In fact he
was a classic square peg in a round hole – stubbornly resistant to all attempts
to make him write in the formulaic manner required for news stories, but clever
and funny when he was freed from stylistic constraints.

Braunias of course went on to become a high-profile writer
and satirist and is now feted in literary and media circles. I’m not aware of
anyone else on that feature-writing course who has made an impact in
journalism. So while I take no credit for Braunias turning out the way he did
(if my tutoring had been inspirational, others on the course would presumably
have shone too), at least my judgment was vindicated.

I mention this episode because Braunias himself recalled it in
a recent interview with an admiring Duncan Greive on the online news and
commentary site The Spinoff.But it’s what Braunias went on to say that
interested me. Here’s the relevant passage, from the section of the interview
in which Braunias talked about that journalism course:

“I couldn’t tell a news story. I had no nose in news. I
didn’t have the hunger for it, or the gall. I just didn’t have what it takes
whatsoever. I was just kind of a dimwit.

“The feature writing course, that was appealing and I kind
of got saved there in a way. I got first place in the feature writing thing,
and it was marked by a guy from the Listener
magazine, Karl du Fresne. He became a bit of a shocking, right wing, redneck,
reactionary goose. It was a bit of a shame that my saviour was writing opinions
so inimical to me, and so awful to read.”

Braunias seems a bit conflicted here. He calls me his
saviour, but in the same breath denounces me because of my supposedly loony
right-wing views. The way he tells it, I was sagacious enough to recognise his
talent, but then something mysterious happened that apparently fried my brain
and turned me into a drooling right-wing imbecile. A goose, to be precise. Pardon
me, but how does that work?

Let me attempt an explanation. In the circles Braunias moves
in, namely the Auckland media priesthood, the only legitimate journalism is
that which conforms to a left-wing template. Deviation is heresy and must be countered
with scorn and ridicule.

The rationale is that if someone is right wing, it can only
be because they’re stupid or nasty or both. (The term redneck, which Braunias
used to describe me, unmistakeably implies rank ignorance as well as
conservatism.) This is the smug, Pharisaical way in which members of the
Auckland media elite dismiss any opinions that don’t concur with their own.

Braunias is not the only offender and certainly not the
worst. Others include Russell Brown – Auckland’s leading prig – and former Listener editor Finlay Macdonald.

My blog in September on the death of Graham Brazier, from
Hello Sailor, triggered a frenzy among the left-wing Auckland twitterati, Brown
and Macdonald joining the pack with gusto.

I committed the sin of questioning the media’s deification
of Brazier and suggested Hello Sailor weren’t the band they were cracked up to
be. To the Auckland media elite, this was heresy on a grand scale. But rather
than address any of my arguments, they ran the line that I must be thick as
well as reactionary. (They were conspicuously silent, surprisingly, on
Brazier’s record as an abuser of his female partners, although I’ve no doubt
that they all see themselves as staunchly pro-women.)

“Christ he’s an idiot,” tweeted Brown, referring to me. Elsewhere,
on his Hard News site, he called me an ass. This is apparently the only way Brown
can explain the fact that someone else sees things differently from him.

“Careful, we mustn’t speak ill of the brain dead,” tweeted
Macdonald. Giovanni Tiso and Philip Matthews weighed in with similarly puerile jibes,
yapping like toy poodles. Braunias chimed in too. All the usual suspects, in
other words.

In another Twitter feed, Macdonald called me an asshole. This
guy’s the New Zealand head of a major publishing company, for heaven’s sake,
and here he was indulging in the digital equivalent of poking his tongue out
and making faces, like the leader of a school playground gang.

These people fondly think of themselves as liberals, but in
truth they’re anything but. Quite the reverse: they’re bigots whose carefully
constructed liberal façade conceals an angry, sneering intolerance of any
opinions that conflict with their own. I think they're gutless, too. They share their views with people they know
will agree with them, because there’s safety in numbers. They hunt in a pack and compete to come up with the cleverest putdown of anyone they don't like.

And here’s another thing. If the explanation for my deviant,
redneck opinions is that I’m too stupid to know any better, should they be
mocking me? Wouldn’t it be more consistent with their sanctimonious
pseudo-liberalism if they took pity on me? Shouldn’t they, as caring people, be
wrapping me in a warm embrace of inclusiveness?

On second thoughts, scratch that. The thought is too
frightening to contemplate.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

I first came across the name John Egenes in 2013, when I
reviewed New Zealand country singer-songwriter Donna Deans’ superb album Tyre Tracks and Broken Hearts. While it
was indubitably Deans’ album, Egenes’ fingerprints were all over it too. He not
only produced it but wrote one of the songs, played several backing instruments
(acoustic guitar, pedal steel guitar, dobro and mandolin) and sang harmony vocals.
It turned out that Egenes, who hails from Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a former
session musician who now works as a lecturer in contemporary music at the
University of Otago.

And there’s a lot more to him than that. Performing last
night at the Wairarapa home of Simon Burt and Pip Steele, Egenes revealed a genuine
cowboy pedigree. In a former life he worked as a horse trainer and, as a young man,
rode a quarter-horse coast-to-coast from California to Virginia. He attends
cowboy gatherings in places like Montana (we’re talking real cowboys here, not
the kind who are all hat and no horse), has friends on the rodeo circuit and
recites cowboy poems. He’s also well-connected in country music circles,
casually dropping illustrious names such as Townes van Zandt and Jerry Jeff
Walker. Oh, and he’s a skilled leather worker who makes saddles and carved the
beautiful leather cover wrapped around one of the two acoustic guitars he
played at last night’s house concert.

Egenes (it’s a Norwegian name, pronounced, as closely as I
can approximate it, as eggerness) mostly sings his own songs, accompanying
himself with a deft, fluid guitar style that melds traditional Merle
Travis-style country picking with a Delta-ish bluesy vibe. They’re charming, laconic,
often whimsical songs – many of them ostensibly about cowboys and horses, but with
a bit of philosophical depth and sometimes a satirical bite as well. He covers
other people’s songs too. His set last night included a laid-back, almost
Calypso-ish reworking of the rock and roll standard Sea Cruise – Frankie Ford would hardly have recognised it – and a
mellow rendering of the lovely Prairie
Lullaby, a song originally popularised in 1932 by Jimmie Rodgers. And while
Egenes left his mandolin and pedal steel guitar in Dunedin, he demonstrated the
breadth of his skills by playing banjo on several songs; not in a flashy way
but in the plain, affecting style that might once have been heard on warm
evenings on an Arkansas cotton-picker’s front porch.

This was the last of this year’s series of house concerts
hosted by Simon and Pip. They’ve now been going for five years (I wrote about the
first one here) and have established a loyal following. Simon has a knack for
finding little-known acts worthy of wider exposure, and Egenes (who has
recorded several CDs) is no exception.

Friday, November 20, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 18.)

I spent much of the weekend mowing
lawns and raking up leaves and other garden debris that had accumulated while
my wife and I were on holiday in the United States. The only thing disturbing
the peace – that is, once I’d turned the mower off – was the barking of a
neighbour’s dog.

Meanwhile, a world away, the
residents of Paris were locked indoors, reluctant to venture outside for fear
of another terrorist attack. There could hardly have been a more striking reminder
of how blessed we are, living in this remote and serene corner of the globe.

We can only hope that people
who migrate to New Zealand value and respect the fact that ours is a liberal,
humane, inclusive and relatively safe society, and that they commit themselves
to helping keep it that way. After all, it’s presumably a key reason why they
come here.

Not that we can afford to be
smug. We are part of a connected, global society and it’s impossible not to
share the anguish and anxiety that the people of France are going through right
now. Neither can we disconnect ourselves from international efforts to confront
and conquer the menace that is Islamist terrorism.

The Islamic State is a
uniquely challenging adversary, especially given that its followers appear to
have no fear of death – in fact, embrace the prospect of martyrdom. But the
fight against them is our fight too.

The Islamist assault on
liberal democratic values – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, women’s
equality, the rights of minorities generally – is a threat to us all. We can’t
pretend it’s not our concern simply because it hasn’t (yet) directly affected
us.

Recent events have sharpened
my awareness of other things besides our comfortable isolation in the southwest
Pacific. Four weeks in the US reminded me once again how insignificant we are
in world affairs.

I heard New Zealand mentioned
once in the news media. That was when I was listening to National Public Radio
late at night and heard a BBC news bulletin that referred briefly to the
pending Rugby World Cup final between the All Blacks and Australia.

Small reminders of home
intruded on us in unexpected, random ways. In Boston’s North Side, my wife
spied a delivery man wheeling a trolley laden with Yealands Estate wine from
Marlborough.

In the same city, I heard Weather With You by Crowded House being
played as the background to a radio weather forecast. And twice in public
places we heard Lorde’s hit song Royals
– once in a Subway outlet in the small town of Tejon, in California’s Central
Valley, and again in the same state when we were eating halibut and chips on
the deck of a seaside café at Morro Bay (a charming spot, by the way).

People have asked me whether
the RWC got any coverage in the US media. Fat chance. Rugby may be the
fastest-growing sport in America (albeit off a very low base), but the media were
interested only in American football, basketball and baseball.

Even universal sports such as
golf and tennis rated barely a mention amid the swathes of coverage devoted to
domestic sport, including college (i.e. university) football, which has a huge
following. In most of the bars we drank in, massive TV screens were permanently
tuned to sports channels showing the three popular codes.

(I love American bars all the
same. I like the way people sit at the bar and strike up conversations with
their neighbours. And American beer is superb. Thanks to the craft beer
revolution, the days when the only options were ghastly mass-produced beers
such as Miller and Budweiser – the beers they serve in Hell – are now but a grim
memory.)

Americans are equally
parochial when it comes to general news. Only the most sensational
international events, such as the explosion that brought down a Russian
airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, elbowed their way into news bulletins.
Mostly it was wall-to-wall coverage of the race for the presidency, with endless commentary and analysis of the main contenders.

I was reminded of a comment I
heard years ago from a New Zealand educationist who had lived for several years
in the US. Many Americans had no interest in the outside world, he said,
because America was their world.

This view is supported by
passport statistics. As recently as 1989, only 3 per cent of Americans held
passports, although the number has increased greatly over the past 20 years
(it’s now closer to 40 per cent, compared to roughly 75 per cent for New
Zealanders).

New Zealanders are certainly
far more aware than Americans of the outside world. We have to be, because
we’re at its mercy in a way bigger, more powerful countries are not.

Our isolation makes us
compulsive travellers, hungry for experience of other places. Yet our concerns
are often just as parochial as those of the Americans.

After four weeks away, my
wife and I returned to a country that was still agonising over the same issue
that dominated political debate when we left: the incarceration of people who
are technically New Zealand citizens (although they regard themselves as Australians,
in many cases having been brought up there) in what Peter Dunne rightly labelled
concentration camps.

Australia’s treatment of
New Zealand detainees is a disgrace, to be sure, and provides further proof that the supposed
Anzac bond is a fallacy. It also demonstrates that by comparison with ours, Australia's penal and judicial processes are harsh and vindictive. They learned well from their former colonial masters.But to put things in perspective, on a scale of one to
10 Australia's treatment of detainees is a two, or at most a three, compared with what the French were subjected
to last weekend.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

■ So why do bureaucrats and academics now begin every
statement with the word “so”?

■ Four and a half million New Zealanders, four and a half
million opinions on the flag?

■ Is it true Wellingtonians are prone to panic attacks if
there are no cafes within sight?

■ Why do highly paid government department CEOs (Ray Smith
of Corrections, for instance) refuse to be interviewed on current affairs
programmes? Shouldn’t it be written into their job description?

■ How hard would it be to pass a law requiring soft drink
manufacturers to place a simple symbol on cans and bottles showing how many
teaspoonfuls of sugar they contain?

■ Police keep urging us to “drive to the conditions”. So
where are they?

■ According to the “One News Now” promotional campaign, we
need our news instantaneously. But which is more important – immediacy, or
accuracy and depth?

■ Why are there so few women surgeons?

■ Could the answer to the previous question have anything to
do with the attitudes of some male surgeons?

■ Go Set a Watchman
– a contender for the 10 worst book titles of all time?

■ Why do smoke alarm batteries wait until the early hours of
the morning before announcing that they’re running low?

■ Had enough of the haka?

■ Remember the days when it was touch and go whether your
car (usually British) would start in the morning?

■ Are “devices” taking over your life?

■ Why do sports reporters refer to someone winning a
“famous” victory only moments after it happened? Doesn’t it take time for
something to become famous?

■ Fed up with pointless stickers plastered on every piece of
fruit you buy?

■ Why are there so few women chess players?

■ Time to ease off on that hackneyed phrase “the perfect
storm”?

■ State houses haven’t changed. The weather hasn’t changed.
So how is it that people who live in state houses are suddenly getting sick, supposedly
because of mould?

■ Saint Dave Dobbyn?

■ Shouldn’t someone point out to Winston Peters that addressing
opponents in parliament as “Sunshine” – presumably channelling Jack Regan of The Sweeney – is just a bit 1970s?

■ Given up trying to keep pace with technology?

■ Solid Energy goes belly-up, at enormous cost in money and
lost jobs, and the men who presided over its collapse walk away unscathed –
something wrong here?

■ Why are there so few women orchestra conductors?

■ When did photographs become “images”?

■ Big men endlessly lumbering back and forth from one end of
a court to another – is there any sport less interesting than basketball?

■ Are there any sociologists who aren’t Marxist?

■ Isn’t it time we dispensed with the tired (and just plain
wrong) cliche that it’s every New Zealand boy’s dream to become an All Black?

■ Why do radio and TV interviewers insist on straight “yes”
or “no” answers when there may be none?

■ When did we start calling lessons “learnings”?

■ Do people with British accents not see the irony in
phoning talkback shows to complain about the number of immigrants?

■ Saint Don McGlashan?

■ Graham Capill, Brian Tamaki, Colin Craig – is there some
immutable law that says leaders of socially conservative political parties and
pressure groups have to be a bit creepy?

■ That term "social media" – shouldn’t it really be
anti-social media?

■ What did New Zealand do to deserve Phil Rudd?

■ When did we start being bored “of” things, rather than
with them?

■ Do we make far too much fuss of our poets? I mean, how
many people actually read them?

■ Where is this place called New Zelland that John Key keeps
talking about?

■ Why do so many left-wing crusaders – Jane Kelsey, John
Minto, Professor Doug Sellman – have a desperate, haunted look? Is it because
they carry the terrible burden of having to save the world from itself?

■ Is Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy a bit thick, or
is that just the impression he gives?

■ Saint Nigel Latta?

■ What does it mean, exactly, when newsreaders say a
journalist is “across” the story?

■ In American movies about men suffering a mid-life crisis,
why does the main character always drive a Volvo?

Saturday, November 14, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 4.)

As you read this, I’m in the United States. It’s a country
I’ve visited several times, but it remains an enigma to me.

The people I meet here are friendly, courteous and helpful.
I see no trace of the crazy America that we read about in the headlines: the
mass shootings, the religious fundamentalism, the overheated patriotism, the
rabid political views, the nasty outbursts of apparently racist police
violence. I find it hard to reconcile these with the Americans I encounter.

It’s a country of extremes, which is probably inevitable
given its turbulent history, diverse populace and tradition of rambunctious
individualism. But in between those extremes, there’s a vast mass of ordinary
people just trying to get on with their lives – people whose values are not so
different from our own.

There’s another striking aspect of the American enigma
that’s very much on display right now: its politicians.

This is a dynamic country full of clever, energetic,
creative people. Even people who profess to despise America devour its culture.

We read American books, listen to American music, watch
American films and television, wear American-inspired clothes, are kept alive
by American drugs and rely on American technology. There’s hardly a place on
earth that isn’t influenced in some way by America.

So, given the incredibly rich human resources with which
it’s blessed, how is it that we see such a dispiriting line-up of candidates
for the presidency?

Surely in a nation of 320 million people – the country that
accomplished the most audacious feat in history by putting man on the moon – it
must be possible to find more inspiring candidates than those whom American
voters are currently considering for elevation to the most powerful political
office on earth?

The highest-profile Republican contender is a braying
braggart with a frighteningly simplistic, one-dimensional world view. If we
thought George W Bush was a monstrous practical joke, a President Donald Trump
would be an even more tragic mistake.

His pitch for the support of American voters seems to depend
on two things. One is his sneering criticism of the other Republican contenders;
the other is his reputation as a man untouched by political correctness. In the absence
of any coherent policy or vision, these are not convincing credentials for the
White House.

What of the leading Democratic contender, then?

Hillary Clinton is the polar opposite of Trump, and not just
in ideological terms. While he plays up his status as a maverick, untainted by
connections with the Washington establishment, Clinton is the consummate
political insider.

She’s capable, intelligent and a seasoned schmoozer. She has
a track record as Secretary of State and happens to be one half of the world’s
most famous power couple.

Her performance in TV debates, and under the blow torch
during a gruelling 11-hour congressional hearing into American deaths in a
terrorist attack for which her Republican rivals held her responsible (rather
unreasonably, it seems to me), has been polished and assured. She gives the
impression she would make a tougher and more decisive president than Barack
Obama.

But she has a few skeletons rattling around in her closet and opinion
polls suggest many Americans don’t trust her. Besides, the Clintons, like the
Bushes, have had their time in the White House.

Trump and Clinton aside, there’s a supporting cast of lesser
presidential hopefuls, consisting of the usual ragtag collection of egotists,
misfits, no-hopers and fumblers – proof that ambition and overweening
self-confidence can take you a long way in American politics even when there’s
a gaping ability deficit.

American TV satirists are never short of material, least of
all at election time. Some contenders for the White House seem unprepared for
questions on even the most basic policy issues.

You could call this the Sarah Palin Effect. The Republican
nominee for vice-president in the 2008 election had never travelled outside
America until 2007 and, when questioned, couldn’t name a single newspaper or
magazine that she regularly read. This presumably inspired her fellow Americans
with the realisation that anyone could run for high office.

It wasn’t always like this. American politics once resounded
with soaring, visionary rhetoric.

Consider the speeches of John F Kennedy, bits of which are
still routinely quoted more than 50 years after he died. Kennedy may have been
a shameless libertine – a man whose alley-cat personal morality was sharply at odds with
his virtuous public image – but he knew how to inspire his fellow Americans with words
that created a sense of hope and opportunity.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably the greatest US
president of the 20th century, had a similar gift. His “fireside
chats”, broadcast over the radio, reached into millions of homes and helped
carry America through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

Like Kennedy, Roosevelt never talked down to his audience.
He spoke eloquently, even loftily, confident that his audience would get his
message – and they did.

Somewhere along the line, America has mislaid this element
of its political culture. I was reminded of this watching a recent documentary
film called The Best of Enemies,
which recalled a famous series of cerebral 1968 television debates between the
American intellectuals Gore Vidal, on the left, and William F Buckley Jr on the
right.

Both the protagonists struck me as thoroughly obnoxious, but
the debates, broadcast to coincide with the Democratic and Republican national conventions,
fizzed and sparked with vicious but sophisticated humour.

Broadcast in prime time on the ABC network during the presidential
primaries, the debates were a surprise ratings hit. It would never happen today
– a risk-averse media would dismiss the concept as too highbrow. And even more
sadly, the same is true in New Zealand.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

By now Richard Wagstaff
should be settling into his new job as president of the Council of Trade
Unions.

He’ll be very conscious of
the legacy he’s inherited. His predecessors include Fintan Patrick Walsh, Sir
Tom Skinner, Jim Knox and Ken Douglas.

Walsh was the closest New
Zealand has come to an American-style labour boss, feared and
hated in equal measure.

Skinner was a moderate and a
shrewd pragmatist, regarded with suspicion by some of his union brethren for
doing deals with National cabinet ministers late at night over a bottle of
Scotch.

Knox was a gruff but likeable
old-style blue-collar battler, a veteran of the 1951 waterfront confrontation
who took over what was then the Federation of Labour at a turbulent time when
the ground was rapidly shifting under his feet – sometimes too rapidly for him
to keep up.

Douglas, who remains active
in public life as a Porirua city councillor, was an avowed Marxist who had the
misfortune to preside over a movement that was fracturing under the strain of
change, and who was accused – unfairly, I believe – of selling out in his
efforts to hold things together.

Each was a household name in
his day, and a power in the land. Wagstaff is neither, and has little chance of
becoming one unless things change radically.

He takes over the leadership
of a union movement greatly weakened by economic upheaval and labour law
reform, but in many ways also greatly improved.

In the days of compulsory
union membership, which ended under Jim Bolger’s National government in 1991,
New Zealand was one of the most highly unionised economies in the world.

But while the law guaranteed
massive membership, it meant that unions were under no pressure to prove their
worth. The result was a plethora of small, weak unions with lazy officials who
collected members’ fees but didn’t do much else.

Paradoxical though it may
seem, compulsory unionism wasn’t viewed favourably by hard-core, militant
unions such as the seamen’s, freezing workers’ and watersiders’ unions. They
saw the movement as being weakened by all those thousands of shop and office
workers with no commitment to working-class solidarity and no interest in
fighting the class war.

It’s a very different picture
now. Unions represent only about 17 per cent of the labour force, but give the
impression of being far more responsive to their members’ needs. They have to
be, or they won’t survive.

The odd little craft unions
that once occupied every dusty nook and cranny of the Wellington Trades Hall
vanished long ago as industries were restructured – or in some cases wiped out
– and unions merged.

Simultaneously, union power
has shifted from traditional blue-collar industries to the white-collar sector.
Deregulation, economic reform and technological upheaval have destroyed the
power bases of once-formidable unions in industries such as freezing works and
car assembly plants.

These days it’s public sector
unions such as the teachers’ and nurses’ organisations, mostly dominated by
women, that have the big numbers. It’s enough to make grizzled old wharfies and
boilermakers weep.

One thing hasn’t changed,
though, and that’s the need for well-organised, effective unions. If anything,
they have become more important since the reforms of the 90s tilted the industrial
balance of power back in favour of employers.

Workers can’t rely on the
state to protect their interests. That was demonstrated at Pike River and in
the forestry industry, where the CTU successfully prosecuted employers over
workplace deaths after Workplace New Zealand declined to take action. Taking
bad employers to court isn’t high on the government’s priority list.

Zero-hours contracts are
another example of vulnerable workers needing someone to stand up for them.

The big problem for the
unions is that people have long memories. Many of us vividly remember the 1970s
and early 80s, when the economy was constantly sabotaged by bloody-minded
industrial disruption.

That ensured there was
precious little public sympathy for the unions when National stripped them of
their power.

But back to Wagstaff. He
seems personable, approachable and articulate, like his immediate predecessors
Helen Kelly and Ross Wilson.

That’s a good start. The
union leaders of earlier generations were often furtive
and hostile toward the media, whom they regarded as the tools of the ruling
class.

It’s different now. Public
relations is an essential part of the tool kit of the modern trade unionist as
the movement struggles to win back public respect.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

I’ve been out of the country for the past three weeks so have only just learned, via political scientist Bryce Edwards’ online political roundup, of the furore surrounding Westpac’s release to the police, without a court order, of private information relating to Nicky Hager.

Edwards details the angry reaction, from both left and right, to the bank’s compliance with the police request, which was reported by the New Zealand Herald.

From what I’ve read, that outrage is entirely justified. The episode confirms that Hager has been justified in sounding the alarm about surveillance and invasion of privacy. We are altogether too apathetic in assuming that agencies such as the police and the GCSB - not to mention corporates such as Westpac - will protect our rights and interests as citizens.

But having trawled through media comment on the issue, Edwards goes on to make a peculiar statement. He seems to suggest that because I wrote a column back in July arguing that Hager is not a journalist in the commonly understood definition of the word, I might not share the media concern about the apparent overriding of his right to privacy by the police and Westpac.

Not so. It’s one thing to dispute Hager’s claim to be a journalist; quite another to approve of the police delving into his private affairs without first having to satisfy a court that it’s justified. In fact I see no connection. Objecting to the way Hager's rights have been violated has nothing to do with whether he’s a journalist. The police action, and Westpac’s apparent complicity, would be just as obnoxious if he were a gravedigger or hairdresser.

As Edwards acknowledges, I said in my July column that Hager does some important work. I wrote that he could teach journalists a few things about uncovering information that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden. I also said his books made an important contribution to informed debate on issues such as state surveillance and honesty in government.

I stand by all that. My concerns about Hager are essentially twofold: first, that he uses the label “journalist”, with all its connotations of even-handedness and impartiality, to disguise his true purpose, which is that of an ideological crusader; and second, that the publication of his Dirty Politics book was carefully timed to coincide with a general election, in the clear hope that it would cause maximum political damage. But neither of those concerns could be construed as endorsement of any disregard for his rights or violation of his privacy.

I do, however, share Cameron Slater’s view that the reaction to the latest disclosures exposes a gaping double standard. Where was the media outrage when Slater’s email account was hacked?

There’s a difference, of course, in that this time it’s an agency of the state that’s digging into someone’s personal affairs. That’s infinitely more alarming than the actions of a rogue private hacker. But Slater is right to point out that the hacker, Rawshark, largely escaped media condemnation - as did Hager, who used the information Rawshark obtained.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, October 21.)

I found myself
watching an episode of The Big Bang
Theory the other night. It was the first time I’d seen it in years.

I enjoyed this
show when it was fresh, innovative and smart. It was a clever but gentle spoof
of nerd culture (or should that be geek culture? I’ve never been entirely sure
of the difference).

The characters
were appealingly quirky, the personal dynamics between them were rich with
comedic possibilities and the dialogue was rapier-sharp.

But that was seven
or eight years ago. Now the show is tired and predictable, and the dubbed
laughter seems to have to grown steadily louder and more intrusive as if to compensate for the laboured
script and lack of humour.

Wikipedia says The Big Bang Theory is filmed in front
of a live audience, but I don’t believe it. The laugh track not only sounds
dubbed, but crudely dubbed at that.

The four central characters
were once believable as academically brilliant but socially dysfunctional bachelors
with neurotic family backgrounds. Now they’re in their 40s and it stretches
credulity that Leonard and Sheldon are still flatting together and obsessing
over childish science-fiction and fantasy movies and TV programmes.

I watched for only 10 minutes or so, which was long enough to confirm
that The Big Bang Theory in 2015 is
running on empty.

This is an all-too
familiar trajectory with American TV comedies. They start out witty and
exhilarating and deservedly attract a big audience. But the viewers don’t seem to
notice when the show ceases to be witty and exhilarating, so the host network keeps
it going – and going, and going. Eventually it becomes a sad parody of itself.

This doesn’t always
happen, mind you. The Simpsons, which
made its debut in 1989, has lasted better than most and still displays occasional
traces of the wickedly subversive humour that made it such a ground-breaker. It
has become the longest-running prime-time show in American television history.

But we’ve seen the
pattern with other programmes. M*A*S*H,
Happy Days and Cheers all kept wheezing on long after their glory years were
behind them.

You learn to
recognise the warning signs when a show starts to lose momentum. Big-name guest
stars begin turning up. There are flashbacks to previous episodes and excursions
out of the studio to exotic locations for visual interest – anything to keep
the viewers interested once the scriptwriters start running out of ideas.

In the recent Big Bang Theory episode that I watched,
the four characters were on a road trip to Mexico. Par for the course.

I also note from
Wikipedia that the frequency of cameo appearances by guest stars, from
physicist Stephen Hawking to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, seems to have increased as
the show has aged. Even The Simpsons
has frequently resorted to celebrity guests.

Another warning
sign is that shows eventually lose their sharp edge and lapse into sentimental
schlock. This was tragically true of M*A*S*H,
which in its heyday broke barriers with its mordant satirical dialogue.

In the case of Happy Days, the desperate quest for
novel story lines led to the coining of a phrase – “jumping the shark” – that
captures the moment when a programme loses whatever credibility it might still
have enjoyed.

It happened in the
premiere of the show’s fifth series, in which the character Fonzie jumped over
a shark on water skis. Significantly, that episode contained another telltale
sign of a programme in decline: the characters were on a trip to Los Angeles,
far from the usual setting of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

To be fair, Happy Days continued for another six
seasons. But “jumping the shark” entered the language as a metaphor for any
gimmick that stretches credibility to breaking point.

The Americans
could learn something from the British here: quit while you’re ahead. Or to use
another old showbiz cliché, keep ’em wanting more.

Fawlty Towers, a series so popular that snatches of dialogue
(“Don’t mention the war”) have entered popular usage, ran for only 12 episodes
– just two series of six programmes.

The scriptwriters,
John Cleese and his then wife (and co-star) Connie Booth, resisted pressure to
extend the show to a third series. They realised there was a point at which the
idea would wear thin.

As a result,
viewers never got a chance to grow tired of the programme. Quite the opposite:
people are still enjoying it 40 years later.

The producers of The Office followed the example of Fawlty Towers by making only two
six-episode series. Both shows now enjoy a status similar to that of a rare
vintage wine.

What’s mystifying
is why people keep watching American shows long after they have lost their spark.

I can only
speculate that there’s a segment of the population that’s comfortable with
whatever’s familiar and predictable, and that can’t be bothered making the
effort to get their heads around something new and challenging. They’re
probably the same people who enjoy eating at McDonald’s because they always
know exactly what they’re going to be served.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Years ago, I watched a rugby league test on TV in a remote
tourist spot in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

The match was between the Kiwis and the Wallabies and I
suspect I was the only New Zealander among the 20 or so people in the TV
lounge.

When the Kiwis scored, I couldn’t help letting out a
triumphant whoop. It was probably not a smart thing to do.

Feeling a roomful of eyes boring into me, I explained,
almost apologetically, that there was an enemy in their midst. Whereupon a fat,
red-faced Aussie male in a rugby league shirt snarled: “You Kiwis are like
bloody poofters. There’s always one of you in the room.”

It was said without a trace of humour. I was so taken aback
that I couldn’t think of a suitable riposte, although a few occurred to me
later. (Isn’t that always the way?)

That he felt no constraint about using a term such as “bloody
poofters”, thereby confirming himself as a social Neanderthal, was telling in
itself. An uncouth Aussie is infinitely more uncouth than the most uncouth New
Zealander. It’s possibly the only sphere in which they consistently out-perform
us.

Long before that night, I had realised that Australians and
New Zealanders were fundamentally different in their culture and outlook. Working
in Melbourne in the early 1970s I often wondered, when I drank with my workmates
in the pub, whether we even spoke the same language.

My colleagues were friendly enough – the women a lot more so
than the men – but there was always a sense of distance between us. I was left in
no doubt that I was an outsider.

I got better on better with the Poms in the Melbourne Herald newsroom, probably
because they were outsiders too. What’s more, they seemed more civilised.

But that night in the Arkaroola Resort and Wilderness
Sanctuary (a beautiful place, by the way) was what you might call a light-bulb
moment. It was only then that it dawned on me that a lot of Australians
actually don’t like us.

This isn’t true of all Australians, of course. Many regard
us with genuine affection.

But if you examine the history of the relationship between
the two countries, you can’t help but be extremely sceptical about the
mythology that surrounds it.

The attitude of most Australian politicians toward New
Zealand isn’t far removed from that of the slob in the TV lounge. They tolerate
us as long as they have to, and they make friendly noises when it suits them.
They’re always ready to invoke the sentimental Anzac bond.

But if New Zealand gets in their way, they don’t hesitate to
squash us. At best, they’re indifferent to us; at worst, they treat us with
contempt.

This has been demonstrated once again by the controversy
over New Zealanders awaiting deportation in Australian detention centres. Our
mates in Canberra couldn’t have sent a clearer signal about the value they
place on the trans-Tasman relationship.

Predictably, there was the usual nauseating Australian
hypocrisy. Interviewed on Morning Report,
a Queensland senator who championed the hard line on deportation said: “We love
our cousins across the ditch, but …”

With Australia, there’s always a big “but”.

We shouldn’t be surprised, because we’ve seen this time and
time again. Remember Laurie Brereton, the minister in Paul Keating’s government
who unilaterally cancelled an aviation agreement with New Zealand and imperiously
advised his counterpart in Wellington by fax? Par for the course.

More recently, John Howard gave Helen Clark what one
political reporter called the Mafia option – in other words, made her an offer
she couldn’t refuse – when the Australians changed the rules relating to New
Zealanders living there.

Clark is no pushover, but her negotiating strength was zero.
Howard knew that and took full advantage of it, as is the Australian way. They’re
the biggest boys in the playground and they know it.

Don’t expect anything to change because of new Australian
prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s professed admiration for John Key. The Key
government’s meekly submissive posture on the deportation issue has signalled to
Canberra that it will be business as usual.

One thing has changed, however, and quite strikingly. The angry
public and media reaction to the detention camp outrage suggests New Zealanders
have belatedly woken up to the fact that for decades, Australia has been
playing us for suckers.

This message may not yet have got through to our
politicians, who continue to defer to the bullies in Canberra out of sheer
habit. But it will.

Friday, October 9, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, October 7.)

I recently passed a personal
milestone. I became a superannuitant.

This entitles me to a Super
Gold card and all the public transport perks that go with it.

A friend of mine, obviously
with far too much time on his hands, worked out that I could travel from my
home in the Wairarapa to Waiheke Island for $49.

This would involve catching
an off-peak train to Wellington, getting on a bus to Wellington Airport – all
for nothing – then catching a cheap Jetstar flight to Auckland.

From Auckland Airport I could
catch a bus free of charge to the downtown terminal, from where it would be a
short walk to catch a ferry – again, at no cost – to Waiheke. The only cost to
me would be the $49 Jetstar ticket.

All very interesting (and
thank you Winston Peters), but what my friend failed to explain is why I should
want to go to Waiheke in the first place.

I’ve been there and while
it’s very pretty, I got the distinct impression that the principal objective of
Waiheke islanders is to relieve mainlanders of as much of their money as
possible in the shortest time available, and often without so much as a smile. (Old Chinese proverb: If you find it difficult to smile, do not open a shop.)

Putting all that aside,
turning 65 does seem a life-changing event. A sum of money mysteriously turns
up in my bank account every fortnight without my having done anything to earn
it.

This a novel and strangely
liberating experience. It means that for the first time in my life, if I were
prepared to live frugally, I could possibly get by without working.

I don't intend to dwell here on the affordability issue, but my view, for what it’s worth,
has long been that the age of entitlement for national super should be
progressively raised, given that people are living and working longer. Of course I would say that, having reached 65 myself. I
certainly intend to go on working while I can. But I also think there’s
merit in the idea that people whose bodies are worn out after a lifetime of hard physical
work should be allowed to retire earlier than 65 in return for a lower super
payment.

As to whether superannuation
should be means-tested, as it is in Australia, I’m not so sure.

The problem with that idea is
that it penalises people who have made provision for their retirement by
saving. This usually means denying themselves things they might otherwise have
enjoyed.

Conversely, means testing
could have the perverse effect of incentivising people not to save or acquire
assets, knowing that the state will look after them. So, on balance: no, it
would send the wrong signals. Slackers could be rewarded and the diligent penalised. What sort of message is that?

But never mind the big policy questions. Having reached 65 myself, I
face a far more immediate personal dilemma – one that confronts almost every person of my age.

Do we carefully try to
conserve whatever we’ve managed to save, keeping a tight rein on spending in
the knowledge that we might need it to supplement national superannuation well
into the future, or do we make the best of whatever time we’ve got?

Put more bluntly, should we
scrimp or live it up?

The complicating factor is
that none of us know how much time we have left. Over the past few years I have
seen too many friends and relations – people of roughly my own age – get sick
and die.

Only recently a friend and
former colleague went into hospital for what should have been routine surgery.
Unforeseen complications developed, as a result of which she died weeks later.

She and her recently retired
husband were still active and looking toward to a full and rewarding life
together. Almost overnight, everything changed.

Such stories are all too
common. Inevitably, they encourage a fatalistic belief that we should live for
today because we don’t know how many tomorrows we’ve got.

Certainly, friends of mine who have
survived life-threatening illnesses are in no doubt that we should make the
most of life while we can.

It doesn’t help when we read
“expert” assessments of how much we need to live comfortably in retirement. The
sums I often see quoted are wildly unrealistic for most people. They can be
hardly be blamed if they give a helpless shrug and ask themselves why they
should bother even trying.

At the other end of the scale
I see anxious letters to financial advice columns from people who have accumulated
very substantial savings and are plainly terrified that they might end their
lives in penury.

This tends to confirm my
long-held view that the more money you’ve got, the more you’re likely to fret
that it isn’t enough.

Fortunately we’re not
presented with a stark choice between living a monastic existence of
self-denial or going on a mad spending spree for fear that we might fall under
a bus tomorrow. As with so many things in life, it’s a matter of balance and
moderation.

There’s a sensible middle course
and that’s the one I intend to take, if I’m allowed to by whatever mysterious
forces control my life. It may mean forgoing a visit to Waiheke Island, but I
can live with that.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Jeremy Corbyn, the recently elected leader of the British
Labour Party, has been described as a throwback to 1970s-style socialism. He
even looks like one, his face being adorned with what one commentator described
as a 1960s political beard.

You could describe him as the accidental leader. When his
name was put forward, few people took his bid seriously.

His 32 years in Parliament were distinguished only by his
record of voting against his own party whenever it deviated from cloth-cap leftist
orthodoxy.

But the trade unions got behind him, party activists signed
up tens of thousands of new members – mostly young, earnest and radical – and before you
could hum the first bar of The Red Flag,
Corbyn was the new leader.

I blame Tony Blair. Corbyn’s prospects must have been
enormously enhanced the moment Blair warned the party against electing him.

The former Labour prime minister is widely despised, and
deservedly so – not just for getting involved in the Iraq war on spurious
grounds, but for his fondness for hobnobbing with people like the odious Silvio Berlusconi
and his shameless money-grubbing since leaving Downing Street.

The term Blairite, which once stood for a “third way”
between the extremes of doctrinaire socialism and ruthless capitalism, is now
toxic – so much so that Blair’s disapproval of Corbyn must have virtually
ensured his success.

The new leader certainly didn’t win the contest on the basis
of his charisma. He’s a dreary grey Marxist. Even Labour insiders say his
election has set the party back years.

For all that, I can understand why Labour members decided to
give Corbyn a go. He stands for something.

His ideas might be barmy, but they seem sincerely held.
What’s more, he appears to have been consistently barmy for more than three
decades. As far as we can tell, he hasn’t wavered from his principles.

In other words, he personifies the politics of conviction –
a rare phenomenon in an era when politics is largely driven by focus groups, PR
spin, the news cycle and opinion polls.

Unfortunately for Corbyn, this otherwise admirable quality
is likely to be useless as a vote-winner.

Conviction politics tends to be a dead-end street. Just look
at the Green Party, apparently doomed forever to languish on the political
fringes (although commentators have recently detected a diluting of its
ideological purity), or Act at the other end of the political spectrum – a
party grimly hanging on thanks to a dodgy electoral accommodation with
National.

Look too at the hapless Tony Abbott, a conviction politician
but a disastrously inept one.

Successful politicians are those who take a pragmatic centre
line, such as John Key.

We don’t have a clue what Key’s values are. He’s never
really told us.

Does he have a non-negotiable bottom line on anything? I
couldn’t say. Does he have any fire in his belly? Not that we’ve seen.

Norman Kirk had fire in his belly. So did David Lange and
even Robert Muldoon, although in Muldoon’s case the flames were often dark and
malevolent.

But not Key. He represents a breed of bland centrist
politicians who tack in whichever direction is expedient.

On some crucial issues – gay marriage, parental smacking – he
jettisoned traditional values that a centre-right party such as National might
have been expected to uphold. But he got away with it, and he’s won three
elections in a row.

His admirer Malcolm Turnbull, the new Australian prime
minister, seems cast in a similar mould, as does Britain’s bloodless David
Cameron.

Barack Obama’s idealistic supporters in 2008 thought he was
a conviction politician, but in office he has disappointed them. That’s
politics for you.

What’s interesting now is that the main threat to Hillary
Clinton’s bid to win the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency, which
until recently was thought a sure thing, seems to be coming from a little-known
Vermont senator named Bernie Sanders.

Clinton is a conviction politician only in the sense that
she’s convinced of her entitlement to office. Sanders, on the other hand, is a
genuine conviction politician and that rarest of creatures, an American
socialist.

Both Sanders and Corbyn have gained traction partly because
of a growing public distaste for entrenched political elites (which has given Donald
Trump momentum too), but also because of a growing perception – and not just on
the left – that capitalism has been hijacked by the greedy ultra-rich.

They won’t win, of course. But at least they remind us of
what politics used to be about.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

After the Dominion
Post and Christchurch Press published
my column on Graham Brazier and Hello Sailor, broadcaster Gary McCormick
contacted me. Gary knew the guys from Hello Sailor well and wanted to explain
the band’s appeal. He submitted a letter to both papers but neither published
it, so I’m happy to post it here.

Karl du Fresne, in
his column about the amount of media attention given to the funeral of Hello
Sailor’s Graham Brazier and prior to that, of Dave McArtney two years
ago, raises some very good questions.

Why the media
attention for the deaths of members of a rock band which Dave McArtney himself
said failed at the critical moments?

They did not have
the success that Dragon had
in Australia and their trip to the US was a disaster. So why the outpouring of
grief at both funerals at St Mathew’s Church and the substantial media interest?

Karl refers to the
drug use which was big among New Zealand musicians at the time and asked, “What’s
admirable about alcohol or drug addiction that wrecks people’s lives?”

Good question.

Hello Sailor’ sGutter Black, written by Dave McArtney, was an anthem of
defiance which struck a pose against the background of the rigid, conformist
New Zealand of the Muldoon years.

Blue Lady and I’m a Texan reinforced an
exhilarating sense (to the rest of us living in small town New Zealand) that here
was a band …. that didn’t care
! From their boots to their loud Pacifica shirts, they were the spirit of summer.
They represented danger, Ponsonby-by-Night (at a time when any young
person who had the opportunity would have lived there) and they were loved
by women in the best rock band tradition.

Dragonand a few
other bands had the same mana, but Hello
Sailor seemed to be around more often and were more accessible to party-goers
from Whangarei to Invercargill.

So, to answer Karl
du Fresne’s question: Hello Sailorhad the songs for Kiwi rockers that beautifully represented a time
and a spirit . They personified and wrote about a Ponsonby, Gisborne, New Plymouth, Timaru and Invercargill
Kiwi-style “Summer of Love”!

The second reason
for the public outpouring of grief was the individuals – Graham and Dave
themselves. Both flawed, Karl noted, as are we all.

Graham had the
serious flaws – all born out of anxiety. Impossibly good-looking and in the
early days, afraid to sing at all. He had an enormous talent as a songwriter – Billy Bold and Blue Lady – and a huge stage presence, but was riddled by doubt.

For someone of his
vulnerability and personality type, drugs were the obvious solution (read Amy
Winehouse.)

Graham’s excesses
(and there were some spectacular public ones) were a part of the battle with
himself. His friends completely understood that and helped time after
time to clear up the collateral damage.

He had a lot of
friends because if you had one relaxed funny conversation with Graham, the
memory of it stays with you for a lifetime. He was a lovely, troubled guy.

Dave McArtney was
Graham’s twin, in my opinion. He loved Graham and backed him. They were like
two soldiers on patrol. It was a brand of loyalty and understanding that the
All Blacks can only dream about!

Thus the media
coverage of both “rock funerals” was not out of order. Paul Simon wrote a song
in which he says “every generation
throws a hero up the rock charts.”

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.